Financial reporting for franchises: getting a 360 view of performance

Running a franchise means keeping a close eye on the numbers. As the business grows, so does the amount of information you need to make sense of.

However many locations you are managing, automated financial reporting will help you understand what is happening across the business without spending hours building spreadsheets.

So what should franchise businesses be looking for?

Go beyond the standard accounts

Alongside profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow, you might want to track budgets, forecasts and KPIs specific to your franchise, from revenue by location and labour costs as a percentage of sales to average transaction value and customer numbers. Bringing financial and operational data together makes it easier to see what is changing and understand why.

Compare performance across locations

If you operate more than one site, consistent reporting makes it much easier to compare performance, see which locations are growing fastest, where margins are strongest and where costs may need attention. For franchisors, the same view across the wider network can help uncover trends, benchmark performance and identify where franchisees may need additional support.

Get a complete view across your franchise

A franchise business may have eight locations, each set up as a separate entity, with six using Xero, one using QuickBooks and another using spreadsheets. Without a reporting platform, month end can involve exporting data from each business, bringing it all together in a master spreadsheet and manually building a group-wide view.

Connecting those businesses and reporting on them together, without having to move them onto the same accounting system, can save time and reduce the risk of errors. It also gives you a more up-to-date view of performance throughout the month, with dashboards, management reports and board packs all drawing from the same underlying data. Joiin connects with platforms including Xero, QuickBooks, Sage and FreeAgent, alongside Stripe and spreadsheets, so data can be brought together while each franchise can continue to use the tools that work for them.

Spend less time building reports

For many franchise businesses, financial reporting involves bringing together data from accounting platforms, operational systems and spreadsheets. As the business becomes more complex, manually pulling that information together each month can become harder to manage and leave more room for error.

Bringing financial and non-financial data into one reporting platform can reduce much of that manual work, whether that’s management reporting, dashboards, KPIs and forecasting for a single franchise, or consolidation and comparison across multiple locations.

At Joiin, we see how useful this becomes as reporting requirements grow. 

Think about where your data needs to go next

As a franchise grows, financial data often needs to be used beyond the reporting platform itself. A reporting tool like Joiin can connect securely with Excel, BI tools, data warehouses and other business systems, helping avoid another layer of manual processes. This means reporting can evolve alongside the wider technology stack as the franchise becomes more complex. AI is also changing how finance teams work with this connected data, creating new ways to ask questions, explore performance and identify insights.

Reporting that grows with you

The reporting you need from your first franchise can look very different once you are running 20 or 100 locations. Having a reporting process that scales means it can evolve with the business, rather than becoming more manual as you grow. The result is less time spent producing reports and more capacity to focus on performance and the wider business.

About Joiin

Joiin is a financial reporting and consolidation platform for franchises, businesses, groups and accounting firms. From a single franchise to multi-site operators and franchise networks, Joiin brings financial and non-financial data together for reporting, dashboards, forecasting, KPIs, consolidation and AI-powered tools. Trusted by more than 65,000 organisations worldwide, Joiin is an Intuit Platinum App Partner and Xero Global App Award finalist.